We study the feasibility and efficiency of policy reforms in polarized democracies. We develop a simple election model where (i) reforms are costly for voters and politicians and these costs increase with the extent of policy change, and (ii) politicians differ in their ability to carry out...

This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. Each party has a predetermined ideology drawn from some distribution. Parties choose a platform and campaign to inform voters about the platform. We find that, the farther away parties are from...

This paper focuses on cross-national differences in patterns of gender economic inequality, revealing their affinity to both welfare state policies and prevailing conceptions of gender equality. By mapping multiple aspects of inequality and assembling them into distinctive profiles, the paper...

This paper examines the role of misleading economic ideas that most likely promoted the economic disasters of the two deflationary periods in Japanese economic history. Misleading ideas deepened the depression during the interwar years, and erroneous thinking prolonged the stagnation of the...

We analyze a legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive issue. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological positions. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We compare the outcome of the...

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaft spielt eine wesentliche Rolle im Drama der multiplen Gesellschaftskrise: Ihre dominanten Strömungen folgen einer ideologischen marktfundamentalen Erzählung, die die Krisen nicht adäquat erklären kann und sie dadurch verschärft. Ziel des Beitrages ist es, einen...